Dafatone:GAT_00: Only if you're worried about the ratio of white people to everyone else.

This.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal recently that began by saying "hey, the middle class is vanishing because of birth rates! Let's use 'white and college educated' as a stand-in for middle class, because that's what we think when we think middle class."

fark the WSJ and fark this line of thinking.

I read that article also. While starting off with whitey as the ideal sample was very poor taste, he did go on to talk about fertility rates of all Americans. The rates were dropping among minorities as well. He even talked about how the fertility rates of the nations have been sending most of our immigrants recently are also seeing fertility rates on the decline.

GAT_00:Koodz: I'm with Gat on this one. I see white racists complain about being out-bred by the browns all the time and all I can think is, "You can't stand your own women enough to fark them. It's almost like subconsciously you aren't convinced of your own superiority after all."

GAT_00:Koodz: I'm with Gat on this one. I see white racists complain about being out-bred by the browns all the time and all I can think is, "You can't stand your own women enough to fark them. It's almost like subconsciously you aren't convinced of your own superiority after all."

And as a progressive humanist, all I can say is: good. White people are oppressors, and they should have a taste of their own medicine at the hands of their victims. I can't wait to see the day when Europe and America is majority nonwhite and their wealth and power stripped away. Only by then could the world be a peaceful and diverse society free of hate.

Ha ha, that's some koolaid... cause we all know hate is only found among white societies, all others are the Garden of Eden compared to civilization...

Anyone know of any economists who are modeling alleged post-scarcity societies by looking at sub-sets of current societies? It seems like we have some fiction, some hypothetical notions, and some anecdotes. Are there any data?

FizixJunkee:Fubini: Fertility panic isn't so much related to overpopulation as it is to funding the old people's pensions. If we don't have enough young people we're going to have to go all soylent green on the old folks homes.

I hate to admit it, but THIS.

You know, my grandparents as well as the other Junkee's grandparents are managing to their live old-aged lives better than any of their grandchildren are living our young lives. They all have pensions, Social Security, savings, homes paid for, etc. Not a single one of them had student loan debt or struggled to pay for childcare ($1,325/month here in Los Angeles). They were able to buy decent homes on a single income rather than struggle to afford a mortgage on two incomes.

Your problem is that you're in CA, the most expensive place in America. If I was in the midwest, I'd be able to buy a house with spare cash 7 years after I get out of school. If I had gone to the Pacific Northwest, I'd have 0 student debt, a nice car (that would be paid off in 6 months), my own apartment, and $40K a year in surplus to spend on whatever I wanted. But I'm in the Bay Area limping along paycheck to paycheck, spending the next 3-5 years paying off the $40K in debt I had coming out of school (and that's assuming that the company doesn't fold. If it does, I'm utterly farked), and knowing that I will never, ever be able to afford a house.

/Mind you, I'm happy I'm here, since I hate working at big, slow corporations, but it does make my financial state precarious.

It's not that we have too few people, there are just too few people who are like me. Educated, affluent, stable, productive 1st world people are rare. There are tons of uneducated poor people from the backward parts of the world (including parts of my own country).

Lady Beryl Ersatz-Wendigo:So what would be the optimal number of people on this planet? We'd need a number large enough to improve and maintain our existing systems yet not so large that they consumed every last resource on Earth.

/been playing Civilization all weekend

depends on consumption level. If everyone lives like an American I would say less than 1 Billion for sustainability. If all 7 Billion live like a typical American man, woman and child than the Earth is FARKED!

LadySusan:Anyone know of any economists who are modeling alleged post-scarcity societies by looking at sub-sets of current societies? It seems like we have some fiction, some hypothetical notions, and some anecdotes. Are there any data?

Excellent question, I don't have any data but I'd love to see some. With that I'm out, work week calls.

Do you know what K-Mart, Wal-Mart, etc do with the tennis shoes that they don't sell? They shred them and throw them away. This is how they can justify selling $2 shoes for $100 a pair. Artifical scarcity.

As long as people exist to limit the supply we'll never reach "post scarcity." We'll shred all the shoes, if we have to. Dig ditches to fill them back up.

LoneWolf343:GAT_00: Koodz: I'm with Gat on this one. I see white racists complain about being out-bred by the browns all the time and all I can think is, "You can't stand your own women enough to fark them. It's almost like subconsciously you aren't convinced of your own superiority after all."

Ishkur:10,000 years ago, 100% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the tribe.5,000 years ago, 80% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the city-state.1,000 years ago, 60% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the kingdom.200 years ago, 40% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the country.Today, less than 10% of our population actively work on providing enough food for the rest of us.

This level of efficiency will soon spread to all industries. Automation, industrial processes, manufacturing and mass production will provide for all, with very little human labor required. Some companies are already so streamlined and efficient that they can execute business operations and move product with a skeleton force that keeps shrinking. Additionally, with service-oriented architecture, one man can run a complete business all by himself without the need for employees. His business operations are modular -- he hires labor when needed....part-time, temporary, contract work.

So what then? What happens when a businesses can be run perfectly fine without employees? Without payroll? Without you? What happens when one man can do the job of one million (like farmers do now)?

We are rapidly approaching that age. The age of post-scarcity and post-capitalism.

Very interesting post. Interesting to see trends being extrapolated.

Question: What about the human need to be... engaged in doing something? I'm convinced that humans need to operate under some stress, with some exertion. That humans operate best under eustress - positive stress. They've evolved from hunter gatherers and farmers. That ancient mechanism still is embedded in them.

I see some celebrities self-destructing because they have no purpose in life, no need to work, to follow some schedule. The circadian rhythms of life force some structure, the rising of the sun, the change of seasons. Celebrities who succeed are the ones who find a new purpose. The ones just chasing the next high are the ones who implode, like a character in a sci-fi novel who has a jack plugged into his/her brain's pleasure center, constantly stimulating it, forgetting to eat or get out of one's excrement.

In the movie "The Matrix", they talked about a perfect world being imposed on humans, but the human brain kept rejecting it. I think there might be some real-world truth to that.

Zombie Butler:Capitalism it's self has some egalitarian features.but tends towards monopolies that have no investment in the well-being of human beings or our finite earth.

Socialism with free-market features might be a good stepping stone. Protection for the earth and people with free market able to function. However, the two systems are disparate in their very nature, so eventually one would subvert the other (honestly this is why I see civil war in China eventually).

I live in China. The socialist, state owned companies are referred to as "monopolies." Because that's what they are.

It's callusion that leads to monopolies, not capitalism per se.

And while a civil war might happen "eventually," I'm betting that it won't happen soon.

The only way we can survive is to stop having so many children. This is not going to happen on its own, it needs divine intervention to fix this. Lots of options, not likely the one you were thinking about the most, or the one after that.

rev. dave:The only way we can survive is to stop having so many children. This is not going to happen on its own, it needs divine intervention to fix this. Lots of options, not likely the one you were thinking about the most, or the one after that.

Alexei Novikov:Got snipped when I turned 18. We already pay people to have babies. It's not working out very well. Article is farking stupid.

Here in the US it can be difficult to find a doctor who will perform a vasectomy on men under 30... or even under 40 if they don't have any kids. Most of them believe you'll change your mind about not wanting children so they try very hard to discourage having the procedure done.

Yeah, the overpopulation lie has been dead for some time. We probably have enough small-time eugenicists and child-haters here at FARK (you know, the type who still find the term "crotchfruit" amusing) where this type of story will still be found either revelatory, controversial, or morally wrong.

Fubini:Fertility panic isn't so much related to overpopulation as it is to funding the old people's pensions. If we don't have enough young people we're going to have to go all soylent green on the old folks homes.

Don't give Nurse Noakes any ideas...

/Seriously, though, can't we get past life as a Ponzi scheme before we destroy all biology on the planet?

My example was the most efficient organization of a 5-7 Million population group consisting of 10, groups 16, 58 story buildings in a square grid, with each of the groups supporting (400x16) 6400 people in the top 50 floors (1600, 5000 square ft apartments) with 4 floors of businesses, restaurants, etc, and 4 floors underground for food delivery, food shopping, parking and underground transport access for the outer 4 buildings of each 1/10th of a mile 16 building block.10 16 building blocks make 1 side of the mile square and 10 more make up the other side, thus 160 x 160 = 25,600 buildings per square mile.

now lets take it to a real world example, which is about a 10 square mile complex supporting 5 million, and within the next 20 years is looking to expand to 6.9 million, due to immigration, and and a continued internal growth rate of ~1.3% combined. The country is Singapore, a city state on the southern tip of Malaysia.They have grown, with levels of renovation and constant construction, in roughly 2 generations (48 years, since independence from being a colony and then from Malaysia as well, to be not only an economic powerhouse in the region, having univeral health care, a mixture of work and government subsidized retirement packages, the highest rate of literacy in Asia and challenging most of the rest of the world, having a 2.2% unemployment rate. All the while striving for independence from Malaysia, and succeeding in creating a water independent infrastructure that can support the population without needing to access the river that flows, but is controlable by Malaysian authority. They have the infrastructure of transportation to move 100,000 people per day through their airports, hosting world events like the Youth Olympic Games in 2010, and having a Formula 1 race event routed through their streets and still be able to have 100,000+ crowds navigate their way home in 15 to 20 minutes through their mass transit systems, busses, taxi's and rerouted traffic for personal cars.Also they have integrated 5 national languages including English, have a Sharia Law Court system as well as the Queen's (British) court system. They provide education in 43 acknowledged "home dialects".They are known for their love of food, which although mostly seafood, also includes a great deal of poultry, lamb, beef, and pork as the great diversity of peoples have strong culinary traditions and citywide competitions to be rated the best in specialized dishes and techniques.

So, like I said if we simply re-plan our cities, we could still have great cities, but with a huge reduction in resources being held up in distribution channels. Think how many miles of water piping currently goes into delivering water to 2,000,000 individual building in the city of LA alone, Then think of the gas lines, the electrical grid, and the sewage lines. Not to mention the thousands of miles of roadways, expressways, bridges, government buildings, gas stations etc.If we planned to condense LA from 100 square miles to even just 10 square miles, not the extreme case of 1 square mile as I presented as technically possible, the cost savings to our country in terms of upkeep, energy costs, government expenditures and other wasted resources, from just LA alone, would be roughly 1/3 of our current national debt (5.3 Trillion) every decade. If we extended the same consolodation to the other top 100 population cities in the country, we could double our economic status, and remove the national debt entirely in one decade, without changing anything else.If we were include changes to our energy creation mechanism, included water recycling, thermal depolymerization for oil production and water purification, algal based oil production, superconductive national electrical distribution network of solar and wind energy to localized electrolisis and hydrogen/oxygen powered steam generating electrical distribution and storage area, we could cut another 90% off of our energy costs, while also eliminating 144 Billion dollars in direct costs of coal oil and natural gas for electrical generation alone, plus the 1.5 Trillion in costs for oil usage in the US for transportation, manufacturing etc.All the tech is here, we just need to plan, implement, and change how we view what cities can and do for us, and what they can and will do for us in the future.

Mentat:The biggest side effect of the population leveling off is that once the baby boomers die off, there will be a massive world-wide worker shortage. Countries will be fighting to let immigrants in. It will be the greatest boon to the Middle Class since the Black Death.

And as a progressive humanist, all I can say is: good. White people are oppressors, and they should have a taste of their own medicine at the hands of their victims. I can't wait to see the day when Europe and America is majority nonwhite and their wealth and power stripped away. Only by then could the world be a peaceful and diverse society free of hate.

And as a progressive humanist, all I can say is: good. White people are oppressors, and they should have a taste of their own medicine at the hands of their victims. I can't wait to see the day when Europe and America is majority nonwhite and their wealth and power stripped away. Only by then could the world be a peaceful and diverse society free of hate.

And as a progressive humanist, all I can say is: good. White people are oppressors, and they should have a taste of their own medicine at the hands of their victims. I can't wait to see the day when Europe and America is majority nonwhite and their wealth and power stripped away. Only by then could the world be a peaceful and diverse society free of hate.

xcv:I'm not even white and I mourn the loss of Young White Women that are in sharp decline against the world's total population. Nearly every heterosexual man of every ethnicity prefers them, with increased competition for a shrinking supply, YWW are going to become an extremely valuable commodity on the planet, again. Wars were fought over them in the past, hopefully 3D printers and gene expression therapy will solve some of the demand.

Bullworth: All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep farkin' everybody 'til they're all the same color.

Well, the Age of Post-Scarcity is coming, and it will be a slow burn over a couple hundred years rather than a complete overhaul within a single generation, which is how all economic systems transform into new ones (ie: Manorialism--->Mercantilism--->Capitalism). And it's going to start with the biggest issue of the 21st century (besides overpopulation, global warming, and dwindling resources): Employment.

As automation replaces the jobs that humans used to do, we're going to see an increasing amount of society capable of running itself. And when it gets to a point where only a fraction of full-time jobs exist and the system is capable of supporting up to 80% unemployment without totally collapsing1.

Why do we work? To make money, obviously. Why do we want to make money? So we can buy stuff that makes our lives more comfortable. Why does this stuff cost money? Because there is only so much of it about. If there's not enough of something, it has value. It's worth something. Rarity is expensive. Everything abundant is worthless. It is free. I'll come back to this point later.

10,000 years ago, 100% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the tribe.5,000 years ago, 80% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the city-state.1,000 years ago, 60% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the kingdom.200 years ago, 40% of the population worked on providing enough food to sustain everyone in the country.Today, less than 10% of our population actively work on providing enough food for the rest of us.

This level of efficiency will soon spread to all industries. Automation, industrial processes, manufacturing and mass production will provide for all, with very little human labor required. Some companies are already so streamlined and efficient that they can execute business operations and move product with a skeleton force that keeps shrinking. Additionally, with service-oriented architecture, one man can run a complete business all by himself without the need for employees. His business operations are modular -- he hires labor when needed....part-time, temporary, contract work.

So what then? What happens when a businesses can be run perfectly fine without employees? Without payroll? Without you? What happens when one man can do the job of one million (like farmers do now)?

We are rapidly approaching that age. The age of post-scarcity and post-capitalism.

We've seen what happens to media (cf. internet) when it reaches a state of absolute abundance -- it becomes worthless. It becomes free. It becomes accessible to everyone everywhere, equally, all the time. Now stretch this same paradigm across all sectors, all industries, all segments of human consumption. What happens?

Maintenance and upkeep of our system is being handled by fewer and fewer personnel. Automation makes things cheaper, more efficient, more abundant. Without scarcity, there is no value. No value, no cost. No cost, no need to pay for it. And if you don't need to pay for anything, then why need money? And if you don't need money, then why work?

Since Capitalism is a resource-based system that requires scarcity to operate, it will ultimately be discarded -- abundance makes it meaningless. What will people live/work for then? Since everything is taken care of, social acceptance within a peer group and self-actualization become prime goals (youtube is a perfect example of this: When people can't find work, they invent their own things to do...even if its just dumb Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake parodies).

I like to envision a Star Trekian future where the essential work (the 2%ers) is handled by different segments of the population during different stages of their lives, like shifts. It would be a mandatory service thing (ie: every 10 years, you must put in six months of labor) that rotates through the populace. So in an average life, most people would only work about 6000 hours. The rest of their lives they do whatever they like.

But I can't see any of this being a feasible reality for another century or so, when technology/AI improves and money becomes even more of an abstraction than it is now. But the key economic indicator is scarcity: Things have value because they are rare. We obtain them by exchanging them with other rare/finite things, namely currency. Once we get over this notion and officially annihilate scarcity (and the need to work for it), then Capitalism will be truly dead and done away with.

But it will come naturally, through social and technological progress, not through revolution. And it will come gradually, over the course of several generations. Not all at once, and certainly not within our lifetimes.

But before all that, we have to evaluate what we live and work for, and why. And we must come to accept the notion that a life of work isn't our destiny (even if we want it). We must evolve beyond the the idea that our lives are governed by the salary and the paycheck.

That might be a difficult thing to do.

/1 You might think this will never be possible, but we're already almost there. Society is humming along now taking care of a great number of people who don't contribute any value to the system: The very poor, the very rich, the handicapped, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, children, students, and the unemployed, underemployed and unemployable are all being supported quite comfortably by the people who are..... and somehow this is not a net negative on society.

Pardon me if someone else already said it, but have you read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"?

SevenizGud:There was NEVER any overpopulation issue among scientists. There was only the overpopulation cover of Time Magazine. The scientists never thought that.

Sincerely,

Every Global Warming Apologist Ever

I don't know if you have magical powers to see the future but scientists back then certainly didn't. The human race would be farked if we didn't change our reproduction habits to respond to the advances in health care. It would have been hard to know for sure the reproduction habits would change, especially if you were trying to predict the future before contraceptives and women's rights.

gingerjet:lets talk about real problems like climat change and feed people - both are political problems

Climate change is a political scam. The oldest one, exploiting people's fear of nature and ignorance to gain control over them and take the fruits of their labor. If we want to feed everyone the state needs to get out of the way, not more into the way. It is these government interventions that cause the problems as you point out by saying they are political.

Get rid of people who think that for whatever reason think they have the right to run the world, to decide how everyone should live, to exploit other people, etc and so forth and a lot of the problems will go away through the natural creativity and inventiveness that is suppressed by the current political process and domination of governments.

gweilo8888:Which is still freaking terrifying. The resources that had to sustain one person just 50 years ago will need to support five people, in fifty years time.

The reason less developed countries have such huge populations is because they are kept in a state of poverty by governments, not only the ones that rule them directly but the ones that support the governments that rule them. (foreign aid, puppet states, etc) It is the state of low productivity they are kept in that encourages more kids. More hands to bring in money, grow food, survive to adulthood, etc and so on. When people become more productive, the extra hands aren't needed and become costly to have. The society in general starts preventing kids from working, etc and so on. The kids become a cost rather than a gain. Also it's encouraged to put more resources into each child.

So, want to solve the third world population problem? Take the boot off their necks and let them prosper.